It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware.

And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not failing to recognize the external display upon docking, despite the display working a few minutes earlier. Not completely failing to find files and apps based on how I typed them (“A” brings up “abc” but typing “ab” makes “abc” go away!?). Such a long list.

This issue comes again and again, I'm getting really tired of this "issue". After all this time this is the top comment, while discussing a really good convertible?

He mentions that people don't trust Windows for savely restoring their session, but if i'm not mistaking, it's Ubuntu ( i think) that had such a bug for a VERY long time ( https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2321399 ). I have never heard such problems on Windows...

It's measuring activities and performance yes, it's not stealing your information. Ubuntu did it too and even integrated Amazon in the search field.

Nico I ha estado major issues and they were the original reason for switching from Windows. I'd love you feedback on them.

1. Apple doesn't slow down due to not being rebooted. I rarely reboot for this reason; basically only for system updates.

2. Suspend I believe is the service? I just close the lid, open, login and keep working. This last time I used Windows wasn't possible. From crashing applications and the direct loss of data due to that crash to not waking and needing me to reboot the whole system.

3. My entire experience with Windows aside from the need to frequently reboot is that it always slows down from the first day of purchase until the day I lose my mind over the speed of it's activity and go buy a new one... This slow down is the slower more incideous one that progresses over months until nothing not even a reboot nurses enough out of it to make it performant anymore.

These are literally the three issues that cause me to be terrified of switching. When Apple did the 'it just works' commercials I switched, because I didn't want to be so involved in the OS. I wanted to just use it and do my things, which aren't nearly as intensive as some others ex. I just do front end work minus the crazy designer apps that require huge RAM and expensive Graphics Cards.

If these 3 things are no longer issues on Windows then I'd really consider it because they are the only reason I'm with Apple at this time. Since Jobs died they've gotten even worse at servicing their MacOS base that it's crazy to be using their product at this point, since they clearly don't give a shit about us.

Lastly I used to use Linux back in the day, but left it because the lips stick (GUI) doesn't abstract away enough of the day to day tasks and I refuse to be a 'programmer' when I just doing regular stuff like writing emails, productivity tools and looking at photos. I'd totally be game if losing a file on download wasn't still a distinct possibility along with the anxiety of not knowing if an app was installed right or full removed; an issue I have with Windows too btw, but not with MacOS.

Look at those prices again, Apple is not “a lot more expensive” in fact the surface book cost as much or more. at least apples machines are high quality, when was the last time you saw a 10 year old PC laptop running like it was new?

> My relevant point was : It's measuring activities and performance yes, it's not stealing your information as the user activity is also anonymous.

Firstly, how do you know it is truly anonymous? And is this anonymisation being done on the users machine, or one Microsoft's servers? If the latter, MS has access to unanonymised data.

Secondly, cross-referenced with other 'anonymised' data sets it is quite possible to de-anonymise people. I'm not convinced there is any such thing as a truly anonymous data set anymore, not when it comes to data collected from a users device.

A governement can automate it to follow it back to the user, but a corporation can't.

They are the only ones that show it this straight forward, can you find a page like that on one of the other big tech companies? ( Apple, Google, Amazon)

TL;DR; You can follow it back to a specific device, but you can't follow it back to "who is the user". Which seems to be a valid business decision, considering the complex matter they are in ( the biggest variety of devices and users).

This seems to be the worst, if a part of a document contains your personal data, when you are working on it and it crashes.

Full data includes all Basic and Enhanced data, and also turns on advanced diagnostic features that collect additional data from your device, such as system files or memory snapshots, which may unintentionally include parts of a document you were working on when a problem occurred. This information helps us further troubleshoot and fix problems. If an error report contains personal data, we won't use that information to identify, contact, or target advertising to you. This is the recommended option for the best Windows experience and the most effective troubleshooting.

> I treat any windows machine as if it has a keylogger and submits all my activity to all major governments (maybe only one today and “all” in a few years when my data gets sold, shared or stolen).

Why is Apple's OSX, which exhibits a lot of the same behavior with spotlight, exempt from this concern?

Don't get me wrong, I don't like these as-you-type-send-it-up search interfaces. But if we're gonna call companies on doing this, Microsoft has scaled back its analytics more than Apple and its App store have.

I would prefer if they’d formalize their promises into some kind of gaurantee that was enforceable. I believe them today, but what about tomorrow? We’ve all seen companies change dramatically (for both better and worse) and do things that were extremely unethical and/or illegal. Companies are run by people after all.

This. What does it matter what OS you are running if you want nothing to leak unless you do complete vetting of the hardware as well. Preferably by ordering many in the same configuration and dismantling one to see it does not have anything extra. And if you do that, there is still the case of the firmware of oh so many components that are integrated to a modern pc. How do you know your network stack is not spying on you.

To be dogmatic, either you have to have enormous amount of resources to create your own secure hardware, or abandon all computing devices.

I prefer using off the shelf computing devices. The only level of security I excpect of them is that no-one will abuse my credit card if I don't act stupid.

> There are good and trustworthy projects out there IMO. I use GuixSD and OpenBSD for all my computing needs and have 0 reason not to trust them. Curious to hear any arguments against either.

If I could use them for anything besides bespoke server projects and really awful desktop environments I might be more interested. As it stands, they're of no use professionally, I've had poor luck on the kinds of hardware I am interest in using as a hobby, and they make Linux seem thoughtful and snappy when it comes to desktop environments.

It's my understanding that companies only need to comply with GDPR when providing services to end users in the EU and that companies that comply with GDPR globally are only doing so due to resource constraints that Microsoft doesn't face.

However, I'm probably less informed on GDPR than the average HN user, so it's very possible that my understanding is off-base or incomplete.

> It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid.

At my workplace it's about 60:40 Windows to Mac user ratio. Regardless of the machine, nobody closes the lid when moving in the office between desks and meeting rooms. So, I'd say it's probably not that.

Back in 2004 I had an ssh terminal open from my Mac (12" PowerBook) to my home Linux server. I closed the lid and took the laptop away with for a trip. For some reason I didn't use the laptop during the week. When I got back home 6 days later I opened the laptop and saw the ssh session. I tried it out and it still worked! I was amazed!

The ssh client had no keep alive. And the sshd had no keep alive. There was not firewall and a long DHCP lease. So it all just worked.

But because of firewalls aggressivly closing xonnections, these days we tend to need keep alives and so I don't this this would work today.

It will connect to a tmux session on the remote machine if it exists or start a new one if it doesn't. If you Cmd+w your terminal window or disconnect, the tmux session stays running on the remote machine.

You could also tell it to try reconnecting every second and bind it to something easy to type like 'kj' (too bad df is already taken)

mosh is an infinitely better user experience for certain use cases, particularly poor/intermittent connections. session establishment is very slow and requires a lot of round-trips, and if you have high latency and packet loss, it becomes painful. if you establish a session once with mosh, you don't have to establish connections after that, you just blit UDP packets.

> Not failing to recognize the external display upon docking, despite the display working a few minutes earlier.

Now that you mention it... I have exactly the same problem with rMBP since upgrading to 10.13.5. Just this monday morning I've spent 20 minutes checking all the cables and why it doesn't work, until I rebooted the machine and then it suddenly worked.

>> Just this monday morning I've spent 20 minutes checking all the cables and why it doesn't work, until I rebooted the machine and then it suddenly worked.

Mnyeah. The fabled Mac-Windows convergence, as foretold in the days of yore. MS hardware gets sleek commercial blogposts from evangelists, like Macs; and Apple's OS needs to be rebooted every once in a while to work right, like Windows.

Given the recent updates in 10.13.x for external GPUs, it might not have been a reboot that fixed the problem, so much as a deferred update to a point-release that fixed a problem created in the previous point-release.

It's so bad. My MBP used to work flawlessly here, connecting and disconnecting from monitors, shutting and opening the lid. Now every time it goes to sleep it loses the ability to talk to my mouse. I've given up and just set the display to remain on for an hour. Sigh.

Just so we can have all parties involved here, this morning I had the same issue with a Dell notebook running Ubuntu (and nvidia graphics which are probably to blame). Couldn't get my external monitor to work until I rebooted.

That's one thing I don't get. Why doesn't apple do this periodically instead if the user having to do it? I have had several occasions where resetting PRAM or something else resolved problem. Why not do it once a day, week or whenever?

The first thing I always do on a new laptop (or install) is go into Power Settings and change the Closing Lid action from putting the computer to sleep to just turning off the screen.

It's surprising how many people never change the settings on their computers. Whenever I saw someone with the taskbar icons combined, I always asked them if they liked it that way, and they would say "No." So I always offered and they always accepted me going into the settings for them and changing it to 'never combine'.

If you put it in your bag, you're more likely to fry something. Was extremely common with spinning rust media. Incidentally, the common cause was "close lid" action set to "sleep", but Windows being unable to actually put the computer to sleep for some reason.

It does if your application state happens to include TCP connections. When Windows wakes, prior to powering up the NIC hardware, it sends all applications a notice indicating that the network is down so everything kills their network connections. This happens on my hardwired desktop. It's one thing if the device can potentially be roaming and changing networks while the system is asleep. But for a wired network connection it's BS.

Sleep isn't supposed to lose any application state, but I've certainly had many issues before with applications freaking out after waking up from sleep, on both a Mac and Windows machines. Sometimes it seems like more of an issue with the way the application handles sleep/network interruptions etc, but the end result is still the same.

There is another comment floating around on this thread about how expecting network state to be preserved after sleep is unreasonable; when the system wakes up most likely its open connections will be stale. Might as well close them gracefully at sleep time.

You can have the power button put the computer to sleep. So, close the lid --> lock the screen; press the power button --> go to sleep. So you don't have to open the lid, log in, put to sleep, close the lid, put in bag- just open lid, push button, put in bag.

If you want some program to finish processing something (e.g. video render), there are programs on both Mac and Windows to keep the laptop from sleeping on demand.

The normal situation, 99% of times, when one closes the lid on a laptop is to not use it, and to not want to have any programs run in the background. You close the lid to put the laptop in your back, take it to the office, etc.

Except if you have your laptop always on your desk and never leaving it. In which case it's not really used as a laptop...

I had an issue where I got a pink screen of death every time i woke my windows 10 laptop up from sleep. I believe it was a driver bug. It finally got fixed with the Spring Creators Update, so now I can sleep my computer again!

(side note/separate complaint, windows 10 tries to update one driver repeatedly, every time I check. I wish there were some way to disable that update.)

You should talk to the last couple MBPs I’ve had. Sometimes they pretend like they’re going to sleep but they actually stay up late and when I pull them out of my bag the next day they have 30% of their battery left or less. Sometimes I’m lucky and the fans will be screaming so I realize before I put it into the bag that it didn’t actually sleep.

You could say it’s my (non-OS) software and you might be right, god only knows how much redundant shit security teams put on there to protect us (read: cover their asses) but why is any software allowed to prevent the laptop from sleeping when I close the lid? It should be assumed it’s going in a bag and should take protective action.

Also, you may want to talk to my laptops about kernel panics on docking or randomly losing window placement for no apparent reason.

I think it’s pretty neat that you’ve had such a bug-free experience but unless you work for Apple and are intimately aware of the frequency or infrequency of these types of issues it might be worth exploring a decrease in snarkiness.

When I had this problem it was because I had Bluetooth on, and the setting "Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer" (on the Advanced dialog of the Bluetooth system preferences) was enabled. I turned that off and the problem went away. I think it was being awakened by my phone.

> Or you can get a Mac laptop, where getting the computer to sleep when you close the lid and start again fast when you open it just works.

Except it doesn't "just work." It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and the doesn't work happens often enough that I don't close my laptop. And let's not get started with plugging into external Apple monitors.

Or change sleep to hibernate. Noticably slower on my surface pro than sleep on my macbook, but not slow enough to actually cause a problem. We are talking difference between 'instant' (macbook) to a second or so (surface pro).

> It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware.

Interesting. I've never seen or even heard of this. Windows didn't do a great job at this in general like a decade ago and the Surface Pros had a bug that was eventually fixed relating to it but I've never heard or seen an issue beyond those. I have multiple Windows and Mac machines and they both do great at preserving state when closing the lid.

I manage a few hundred Windows notebooks. Probably about half of them have issues hibernating. Despite the fact that they are identical systems, identical image, etc. I just tell everybody to shut it down before you put it in your bag. Otherwise we end up with overheated, melted laptops. It's always been this way in my experience. Windows is certainly better than it used to be at this, but I would be willing to believe that the hardware vendors aren't implementing things properly. I guess that's the downside of not controlling your hardware.

Chrome has a very parasitic relationship with it's host OS's. Stopped using it when it halved the amount of hours a brand new MacBook lasted on a battery. My apologies for the webdevs that have to maintain Safari compatibility for me but the difference is just too big to ignore.

At this level, do you have "premium" access to Microsoft support? At some point the company actually listens to you, right? What happens when you contact them, get ahold of a person, and say "yeah we paid you $300k in license fees the last 3 years. This pretty basic feature of your product doesn't work. Can you fix it for us?"

Do they really just tell you to go pound sand when a corporate client asks them for support?

Yeah, I saw a dude in the elevator (this year) because his Windows 10 started installing updates when he shut it down, but he needed to leave the office.

I get so much crap when I say this online, but Windows is a complete shit show. Yeah, there are issues with macOS, but it is lightyears better. Yeah, I know Apple has dropped the ball on hardware, but my 5 year old MBP is just fine.

I have more problems with my late 2016 MBP now than I do with any of the Win10 machines I use, and I've been using both OSs for 25+ years. The whole" Windows is a shit show" feels like the tired diatribe of people that want to crap on Microsoft but haven't actually used the OS themselves in years.

Okay, so recent story from a Mac user here. My boss got a new Surface thing - I don’t know which exact model, sorry - and actually he really likes it. (He’s also a Mac guy.)

So we’re sitting on a plane and he’s showing me how easy it is to sort email in tablet mode, and it blue-screens. Really unlucky, right, because normally it doesn’t do that of course. But hey, shit happens, we chuckle, whatever.

So he puts it in the seat pocket. Then 45 minutes later we land, so he gets it out of the seat pocket. And the thing is burning hot because it hasn’t shut down. It’s just sitting there, on the blue screen, fans going mental.

This is a device made by Microsoft, running Microsoft software. And we’re in 2018. And that’s the default behaviour. It’s not great, is it?

In a way it doesn’t matter if the OS can recover because people don’t think it will, and it also says “do not turn off your computer”. It’s not at all hard to imagine people feeling glued to their desks or afraid to take the machine away with that information.

If the OS can recover, it should just say “you may still shut down at any time but the update will start from the beginning if you do”.

My 5 year old MBP is more than fine, it's great, but I am worried about what I will be able to buy to replace it. Eventually it will break; if not then someday I'll want something with more computing power.

My mid-2012 MBP was one of the best laptops I've ever owned. Unfortunately I eventually broke the screen and it was going to be $800 to replace it. This happened about the time the MBP line got refreshed in 2016 so I got one of the new ones.

My 2016 MBP has been the worst laptop I've ever owned... fails to sleep, fails to wake, physical keys keep dying, touchbar freezes and won't unlock the machine, it can't keep external monitors straight (to be fair, that might be more of an OS issue than hardware?)

Sell it and buy a refurb from a reseller. I did to replace my busted 2013 with a 2015, and now I'm set hopefully for another few years until Apple comes to their senses.
I use Windows just for games, and the sheer frustration even there is enough to turn me off of it. Basic things like launching apps and control panels from the search bar don't work. It fails to pick up the right resolution on my external monitor sometimes. "Geforce experience" is a piece of crap that requires an account to use. Everything feels like I'm at a mall, instead of on my own PC: tacky, hostile, fake, noisy, incoherent.

There is no Mission Control, no Time Machine, no Spaces, the UI still thinks of document windows as applications, there is no Application menu, the keyboard shortcuts are crap, application installs dump stuff all over, settings don't apply immediately, resolution scaling is broken, ... People who think Windows is on par with macOS don't know jack about macs and never bothered to get good at them. It'll be a cold day in hell before an NT-derived windows can compete. MS needs to clean house and commit to doing what Apple did with OSX in 2001... Get rid of the cruft, put the user first, and make everything work.

The article's mention that ejecting the screen takes a software release and that certain apps can prevent it is the kind of bullshit Steve Jobs would've mocked and told the developers to fix if they expect to be taken seriously. A product should serve the user and provide affordances, not hold them hostage.

Migrating to my new MacBook was trivial, and the machines set up an adhoc WiFi network automatically to transfer all the files. Once done, everything worked as before. All without my involvement. That's why people use and want Macs.

Well said... Two more I would add to your list of things to fix - 1) Windows always starts out great, but in a couple of years needs a reinstall to get performance back. It needs a way to really uninstall and not depend on an app to make it's own uninstaller 2) Dismal battery life. The article indicates they helped with that on the SBP by using two batteries (plus using an 8th gen CPU), but that is a band-aid. Windows to apples on the same HW and running the same apps have vastly different battery life (provable when running boot camp), and in my experience Windows is more likely to have a rogue process or service which sucks power (although OSX can have that too, it's at least easier to identify and kill).

Just upgraded to a 2015 MBP, and still use Win10 for my home system which is fine there. For mobile tried a new Dell XPS with both Windows and Ubuntu for a couple of weeks thinking the shiny HW would make up for the OS, but it was not a good experience. Was a relief to get back to OSX...

These are fair criticisms, but I don't think anybody has this nailed. I use a mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux, and have found myself walking around with the lid open in all three. Mac seems to handle what you describe better than everyone else, but it's far from perfect.

I have one monitor that used to work fine on Windows and Mac. After a software update the Mac only recognizes it about 1 in 20 tries of plugging and unplugging.

Macs seem to be pretty good in my experience. It was something I really noticed about them when I first started using about 8 years ago. The only real monitor problem I've had was with an iMac that decided it didn't want to initialize the dual displays properly if the 2nd was plugged in when it was booted. Took me about a day to figure I needed to unplug the 2nd display. Eventually some OS update fixed it.

Linux is a lot better than it used to be. I can reliably close the lid on my Lenovo X200 running Fedora. And anecdotally there seem to be fewer people going between meetings with laptops open these days so that's presumably a common experience with RHEL and Fedora on company-issued laptops.

OK, so RTFM jokes aren't funny anymore. Specifically, what you're looking for is to change the hibernation mode. Old macos used to keep the RAM powered during sleep, so there's a slight drain on the battery, and if it runned out, well state was lossed. BUT the upshot was that wakeup was instant.

As it turns out, that's the default mode on desktop. And you can set your laptop to do that too (assuming you're ok with the tradeoff).

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Here's the relevant section from the man page:

hibernatemode supports values of 0, 3, or 25. Whether or not a hibernation image gets written is also dependent on the values of standby
and autopoweroff
For example, on desktops that support standby a hibernation image will be written after the specified standbydelay time. To disable
hibernation images completely, ensure hibernatemode standby and autopoweroff are all set to 0.
hibernatemode = 0 by default on desktops. The system will not back memory up to persistent storage. The system must wake from the con-
tents of memory; the system will lose context on power loss. This is, historically, plain old sleep.
hibernatemode = 3 by default on portables. The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will power memory
during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless a power loss forces it to restore from hibernate image.
hibernatemode = 25 is only settable via pmset. The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will remove
power to memory. The system will restore from disk image. If you want "hibernation" - slower sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery
life, you should use this setting.

People in my office (including me) move around with their MBPs pretty frequently. I know saying "other than the keyboard, they seem to be pretty well built" is the tech equivalent of "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show," but I've never had any issue with waking up from sleep, or display issues when I disconnect the external monitor, whether or not the laptop lid is closed at the time. (I generally run with the lid closed when I'm at my desk.)

> Not completely failing to find files and apps based on how I typed them (“A” brings up “abc” but typing “ab” makes “abc” go away!?).

It's the 'basic' stuff like this and bizarre feeling UI pauses at blank windows that make it unbearable to work with. It's the opposite of snappy and constantly interrupts a productive workflow making me wonder 'why is it doing this' rather than thinking about my work. It's like having an essentially perfect phone that inexorably buzzes every 1-5 minutes (at random), you would throw it against the wall in less than a day.

I use Windows 10 at work and at home, and in my experience it's been more stable than Windows 7, which I similarly used at home and at work for years. Annoying mandatory updates aside (and now less annoying since you can control when they happen), Windows 10 is pretty much the same Windows experience as before, in a slightly different skin.

One thing I noticed that was fixed with Windows 10 that was a problem in Windows 7: my laptops now handle state properly after the lid is closed (assuming you use hibernate or sleep rather than just screen-off).

Completely the opposite experience. I paid for windows 10 because I was going through a gaming streak and hoped that the more premium version would be more configurable from the privacy-invasion standpoint, switching from Linux. What a mistake. After a miserable experience of figuring out how to disable the spyware and the auto-updating bundleware crap, it worked fine for a while... then: BSOD after BSOD. Sometimes it was once a month, toward the end it was multiple times a day. Pretty much it would grind to a halt over the course of a few seconds and stay completely frozen for a few minutes before totally giving up. I ran memtests and they checked out. Put CPU at stock speeds and kept having problems. Disabled all non-essential hard drives, reinstalled drivers, it still persisted.

Yes, I absolutely get that it's probably a hardware issue, but I couldn't figure it out based on the logs and driver installs/reinstalls. I had nearly identical hardware with Windows 7 and Linux and never encountered these problems. I get that these things happen but I'm a lot more confident in
1) it almost never happening on modern linux distributions and 2) it being more-or-less diagnosable if it does.

There were other issues as well. Mysterious microstutters on top-level hardware, more and more unwanted crap being installed and re-enabled after each major update, the update system as a whole....

After a while I got tired of it and switched back, regretting wasting the money.

>I have literally this same list of problems on MacOS. Connecting to external screens is apparently hard.

Never had any problem connecting 3 different MacBook Pro's (across the years) to 3-4 different external monitors (Dell, LG, Samsung, etc) and to several projectors (including through a VGA adaptor and HDMI ones).

>MacOS also ignores commands to lock the screen until it’s done changing screens.

I personally enjoy my MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2016) but it has a problem with going to sleep after being plugged into an external monitor all day. I find at least 1/3rd of the time it has frozen after being disconnected from the monitor and I am forced to do a hard restart. Perhaps this is user error, but I do not remember having as much issue with the older generation. I use two Dell IPS monitors which are relatively new and connect via HDMI => USB-C adapter. It's an inconvenience which you shouldn't have to deal with on several thousand dollar laptops.

> Never had any problem connecting 3 different MacBook Pro's (across the years) to 3-4 different external monitors (Dell, LG, Samsung, etc) and to several projectors (including through a VGA adaptor and HDMI ones).

Consider yourself lucky.

> So for all of 2 seconds it takes?

Most times. But occasionally I've seen the OS seemingly get confused/stuck in the process. Flickering, moving windows into various locations on the screen, taking 10-15 seconds to get back to functional/usable.

> And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not failing to recognize the external display upon docking, despite the display working a few minutes earlier.

I use and seriously like OS X but...those are two of my biggest pet peeves with the OS. I constantly need to re-arrange my windows every time it notices that an external display had been added or removed, and it frequently (maybe 2 per week) will inexplicably refuse to recognise an external display until I go through a little dance of power cycling things, unplugging them, plugging them in, and trying again.

Worse, it also periodically stops working with my (bog standard USB) keyboard and mouse until I unplug them and plug them back in. It's amazing how confusing it can be trying to debug why a UI element isn't working when clicked until you determine that the computer has decided a modifier key is stuck down.

The Apple ecosystem was fantastically stable and reliable a few years back, but things are changing, sadly.

Mac has similar issues. Keeps losing bluetooth connections with mouse & keyboard, sometimes have to restart to recognize the display. Still does not have simple way to hide icons on desktop or to dock multiple windows and resize them without using a third party solution.

I’ve used windows since 3.11. Sure I’ve had a stint of Linux here and there, especially when I was young enough not to be bothered by the configuration.

I’ve never not liked windows, though I did skip both ME and 8, but windows 10 has been such an awful experience that I bought a mbp late 2015 version last year, and I doubt I’ll ever use windows as my main OS again.

I still use it at work, and while you avoid a lot of the shit, like auto-installed pre-installers for Facebook styled games in an enterprise setup, it still lowers the brightness of my screen when I undock it, even though I’ve specifically told it not to in every setting I’ve been able to find.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, windows 10 is quite frankly the worst OS I’ve ever used.

This and other similar things are so often and easily ignored. I see people talking about Macs not supporting pro use. But hey, tell me, how am I going to power my 6 external displays on a Surface product of any kind?

I get that people want some more variety and excitement, and maybe feel like the Thunderbolt port thing is problematic (despite absolutely enabling my most “pro” setup I’ve ever had on my ’17 13” TB MBP) and obviously the keyboard design has issues.

But as a whole package it’s still the best commercial product you can buy in its space, and considering actual size, has no real competition even if you ignore the many, many software issues one faces when leaving the warm, design-loving embrace of the macOS software ecosystem.

I’ll reconsider this situation after Microsoft releases a Surface product that isn’t almost guaranteed to require one or more returns to the store and oh, yeah, has Thunderbolt 3 support so I can plug in 2 cables to get: 6 external displays (1 4k, 5 2560x*), NVMe speeds to external storage, gigabit ethernet, digital audio, SD card reader, spare ports, etc. etc. (aka OWC TB3 Dock with nearly every port in use.)

There are a few non-MS laptops that might handle the hardware requirements I meet with my current setup, but, nothing that couples the hardware with the Software. Show me even one single app that matches the care and design of Things for macOS + iOS, for example. These are things I use every. single. day. for nearly every. single task.

Frankly, I look forward to Apple fixing some of their issues with the MBP line and hopefully by then the situation with mobile processors will be improved enough to allow for some bigger memory footprints and the like, though, honestly, despite running minikube based workflows locally, I’ve never ran out of RAM at 16GB. I guess it’s because I don’t use Slack.

> I see people talking about Macs not supporting pro use. But hey, tell me, how am I going to power my 6 external displays on a Surface product of any kind?

I have many friends, most of whom are professionals, but none of whom are software devs. A bunch of them do devops and SRE work, a bunch of them are creative professionals, and a bunch of them are in other professional services, like finance and law. Personally, I work for an "IT services" company, essentially doing outsourced devops and ops for numerous other professional services companies.

What I'm getting at is that I know literally hundreds of professionals, across my personal and work life. The sum total of those in my life who need or use 6 displays: Zero.

You are not, in any way shape or form, a typical professional. If you need 6 displays (which you might, but I'd bet a dollar you don't) you're basically so far out of the ballpark of standard professional that you're on the moon.

Let's not pretend that the Surface Pro — or the Macbook Pro, for that matter — are in any way not suitable for the vast majority of professionals.

I don’t know of any stock dealers using kubernetes, but, maybe I’m just out of the loop.

No, I’m a developer, I work in, I dunno what you want to call it, Machine Learning Data Engineering? Stuff like that.

I use seven displays because I like spatially organized workspaces. Four of them are only 10”, effectively 1280x800 displays, two of which are always showing terminals. I have a particular way I like to work that I’ve developed around how macOS handles multiple displays/Spaces that benefits more from many small displays than few large ones.

I used a tiling window manager years ago when I ran Linux as my main OS. I’ve used similar third party tools to try to get... a similar effect on macOS but it always falls apart.

In the long run, I more greatly value the software I get to use on macOS (not to mention things like first party hardware and software support) over the window managers and that type of thing available elsewhere, and frankly, as a geek, it feels cool having a matrix-operator-like setup as my workstation so I’m happy.

It’s up there. Well, kinda. The eGPU asks for all of the PCIe bandwidth available on its TB3 controller, actually, it asks for it twice, once for the video and once for the audio devices. But in reality it requires far less. For one, the entire screen data set isn’t sent constantly over TB3, that’s going to be highly variable but never especially demanding since I’m not running any games or anything like that there. And two, the displays on that are all 2k (2560x1600) resolution.

On the other controller, although it’s the one that doesn’t actually offer the full 40GBps, we have a 4k and a 2560x1400 display actually driven via DP over TB3 so that does eat up a lot of bandwidth. About 24Gbps. What’s left is basically powering a USB 3 hub with a handful of devices rarely using their full capabilities simultaneously. So it’s plenty of remaining bandwidth. But the official requested throughput is actually well above the real capability of the hardware so it’s hard to say exactly how close to maxed out it all is. Just that I’ve not yet had any issues or conflicts with the setup.

The instantaneous system wide search is my number one favorite thing about Mac OS. I wonder how many hours of my life I have spent waiting for a Windows explorer search to complete only to accidentally click on one of the results, hit back, and have it start the search all over.

"Everything" is the among the greatest pieces of Windows software ever written. It is wonderful. I cannot figure out why, with all of their money, Microsoft doesn't just pay the guy a little cash and make it a built-in feature of Windows. It would increase the usability of Windows, especially among novice users, enormously.

Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not failing to recognize the external display upon docking, despite the display working a few minutes earlier.

Both of my MacBook Pros (2015 and 2018, Sierra and High Sierra, respectively) exhibit this exact behavior.

I deliberately avoid letting my laptops go to sleep, and try not to unplug them from their monitors because I don't want to spend time re-positioning every single window and tool palette. It really defeats the purpose of having a laptop.

I used to leave my (very old) laptop lid open not because I didn't think it would restore properly but because it took much longer than I liked to come back from suspension. My new Thinkpad X1 Carbon restore quickly (much quicker than my much more powerful desktop even).

My understanding is that window size and positioning issues on Windows are a graphics card driver issue and it's up to the graphics card maker to finally fix it. I don't know the details though, that's just what I've read. It's obnoxious for sure.

It probably sleeps too deep. Because it takes that long to resume, It looks like your laptop hibernates instead of sleeping. It can be quick enough with a fast SSD and not too much RAM. I usually disable hibernation on my PCs, the sleep consumes some power maintaining RAM state but the amount is low, a laptop can sleep for days. Wake up from that state takes about 1-2 seconds.

People do that with both operating systems where I work and they’re both hit or miss which is why people do that. Am I exchanging messages from HN users through some kind of time portal to the Snow Leopard era? Apple has been dropping the ball big time with macOS for a while now and if you haven’t run into window rearranging, bizarre monitor connecting issues or kernel panics from docking I am insanely jealous.

Probably a moot issue with Connected Standby enabled laptops. It doesn't actually sleep - just puts everything in low power mode - my X1 consumes 0.3W in that mode and the desktop is right there as soon as I open the lid and place my finger on the FP reader!

That reminded me that I once had Windows XP and Vista RC1 installed as dual-boot. I was finishing slides in XP and closed the lid. When I opened it a few minutes later to give my presentation, it was running Vista.

Such articles always give too much importance to the hardware (which is somewhat important, no doubt) and not enough importance to the software.

Many people are looking for quality alternatives to Macbooks, Mac Mini, etc (myself included). Mac Mini hasn’t been updated for 4-5 years. So, I started setting up a Windows desktop as a Mac Mini replacement. But when it came to finding all the alternatives to the OS X software I was using, and when Windows started showing me notifications about “try Edge,” “give us your valuable feedback,” etc, I went back.

If only Ubuntu could have native MS Office (needed for docs from lawyers), Sketch / Adobe products (needed for working with our designers), etc!

Although WSL is great, having a system that could lock itself and start updating at any moment even ignoring user preferences is unacceptable. Trust is at the core of a lot of complaints against Windows, and Microsoft is not helping by forcing updates or reinstalling applications/ads the user specifically removed.

I use windows 10 on several computers and while I did see that updates-mid-day behavior in the beginning I haven’t seen it in a long time. I’m not sure whether this is a real problem anymore, especially with windows pro where you can defer updates.

I have the same problems as most people: it's a separate subsystem, which means you either need special integration or simply can't do what you want to do. The filesystems aren't the same, the devices aren't the same, the networking isn't the same, and all three are pretty much needed for daily work.

I suspect that most things that you can do in mingw64 will work the same in WSL, but things you need to do beyond that are basically broken in WSL and sub-optimal in mingw and almost always gets you to a point where you need a VM.

At the same time WSL has super limited benefit if you don't need any of the windows stuff, it basically means you are using linux inside windows but not using windows. When you use 'shell oriented workflows' on macOS, it just works, be it with BSD vs. GNU diffrences, which are easy to overcome by either learning or installing GNU versions of the tools you want (using a package manager like brew). In this setup, everything is the same system, what you do in the GUI also exists in the CLI, they interact directly with eachother, maintain state equally well, integrate directly with the rest of the OS, and basically has desktop functionality that isn't in the way of your development capabilities.

The only downside you can expect is if you need native windows development or windows-only tools, for everything else, windows doesn't really count anymore in almost all environments where I work (which is mostly retail, ecommerce, FOSS, infra). Only a small subset of things (large in quantity, small in configurations/versions/specific needs) that are managed by MSP's are still embedded windows or enterprise windows.

We do have a few people that actually like windows (be it the GUI, long time experience or simply brand affinity), but that's about it.

Can you provide some examples? I've used the fs and networking without issue, so I'm wondering where you hit issues. I can host a server in WSL and hit it from windows via localhost. I can download a repo in windows and access it from emacs, I can download a repo using Linux git into a windows file system and edit it from either OS. Is it that some parts of Berkley sockets aren't implemented fully (or weren't last time I took it for a spin last year)?

That is not a solution. I want to work on files in my WSL home folder. Lots of language based package managers like npm and composer "live" inside a folder in your home directory. It's very important that VSCode running as a windows application be able to read/write to these files.

As it is right now I can't even edit my ~/.ssh/config from VSCode without jumping through hoops.

If you want to access your home folder in both, all you have to do is first create the folder in Windows, for example, create a wslhome folder inside your user folder in windows. Copy everything in your current WSL home folder, including hidden files, into that one. Then rename your WSL home folder to back it up and replace it with a symbolic link to the Windows folder. In WSL, use ln -s /mnt/c/Users/[your Windows user name]/wslhome /home/[your wsl user name]. The real folder exists in Windows and is usable in either environment.

> I want to work on files in my WSL home folder. Lots of language based package managers like npm and composer "live" inside a folder in your home directory. It's very important that VSCode running as a windows application be able to read/write to these files.

No. You don't want this. Linux and Windows are different platforms; if your Windows application could use your packages installed through Linux (and vice versa) then none of the native modules would work without a reinstall.

The side effects suck and they can make it better IMO but not sharing dependencies isn't an issue at all IMO.

> As it is right now I can't even edit my ~/.ssh/config from VSCode without jumping through hoops.

Yeah that sucks though for some things like git bash, etc, they use the proper windows home directory. So I end up just keeping those there and straight up copying or aliasing them to the WSL home folder.

Globally installed npm and composer packages live in ~/.npm/ and ~/.composer/ and they both have a global packages.json esque file that I need to occasionally edit. The packages installed in those folders MUST be parsed by VSCode for intelesense to work properly.

All I'm saying is I'm not gonna jump through all these hoops. I'd rather just keep working on my mac.

Hell I'd rather hackintosh a surface pro rather than deal with these issues.

npm/node works fine in Windows (and I'm pretty sure it's the same with composer), so why do you want to use it in WSL?

Edit: this is a genuine question of an engineer, who uses Git/npm/node for fullstack development on Windows 10 every day. What kind of setup do you have and what UX do you expect, that requires running the tools in WSL?

I just don't want to use Windows to test my code when production is in Linux. There are things all those tools do when running in Windows that is specific to Windows. And I'm not some anti-windows Microsoft hating guy. My main desktop is running Windows 10 and I was quite excited for WSL to come out so I had Windows 10 Insider Preview running on my machine for more than a year. But at the end of the day when I want to do "real" work I keep going back to my Macbook.

Windows command prompt compared to bash is simply horrible. I personally find Powershell to be just as bad. The console app in windows is still light years behind Terminal in OS X. In fact VSCode's built in terminal wrapper is orders of magnitude better.

Things like wkhtmltopdf to generate PDFs or ffmpeg to work with videos should run as they do in Linux on the production server. In OS X I can use brew to set things up. In windows I have to hunt down binaries, put them in the right place, and set the path manually via an OS level GUI many clicks down in Advanced Settings.

The extra work I need to do to make all those tools work in windows makes setting up a windows dev environment cumbersome and annoying. The way it's laid out in OS X gives me way cleaner interoperability with the way the code actually runs in a Linux environment.

It's one of the reasons I love WSL! Finally I can have a ~/.ssh/config in Windows! But I still can't edit the file from a Windows text editor.

Finally if I'm on a team where the production environment relies on some of these linux binaries being available I don't want to waste work hours researching and writing on boarding documentation for the one dev that feels like working in windows when the rest of us are on macs.

Stuff in lxss is treated "special" - files in that directory have unix numeric permissions on NTFS instead of ACL permissions. Windows doesn't know how to set those, so if win32 subsystem is updating permissions (for instance, on file save) and the linux subsystem is updating metadata (for instance, on file save), it's possible to end up in a state where neither subsystem is able to get permission to touch the file again.

For this reason, it is recommended to only edit files outside this directory from both subsystems (not to say this isn't issue-free, but it's relatively reliable.)

The file becomes invisible to WSL right after it gets edited in Windows. It's because it's doing weird tricks to associate UNIX permissions to files stored in Windows. The Windows app will break those permissions so instead of mitigating that in WSL it simply stops being able to "see" the file.

I don't know when you last tried it, but IO performance is much better in the new (Fall Creators Update) version. I had the same problem with git status but after updating it's much quicker. Things also seem like they're faster in the WSL file system than when you're using WSL in the Win32 file system.

It is much better (and even better if you disable Windows Defender on your WSL stuff), but it's still not nearly as fast as actual Linux. I switched from WSL to a Linux VM primarily due to IO still being slow enough to be a problem for me.

I didn't mention "typical" Windows user. WSL will always be a second-class citizen in Windows, so if you are power user trying to improve your performance, what's the point in choosing a second-class solution after choosing this OS? Learning one more shell, just like learning one more programming language, has some benefits.

Because I like Windows for myself but my company uses Linux based servers and bash as our shell. It's not just about ME switching to PowerShell, but getting 30 other people to do it too. Not gonna happen.

I periodically boot into Windows 10, mainly for join.me calls with customers, and I'm always curious to see how the WSL is progressing. It's clearly come a long ways, and I'm encouraged by the recent support for multiple Linux distributions. But for development purposes, it's doesn't yet come close to replacing a native Linux environment.

The performance is frankly terrible by comparison -- for example, running `bundle install` in a moderately complex Rails application will take nearly an order of magnitude longer (not to mention the Windows virus scan process soaking up 30% of your CPU the entire time).

Another issue is with background services -- I've had numerous issues running PostgreSQL, Redis, and other services (e.g. some services fail to start, or cannot be cleanly stopped, or I'll encounter strange network errors). However, these issues are all documented extensively in various GitHub issues, so hopefully they'll be resolved going forward. For PostgreSQL, the usual suggestion is to install PostgreSQL in Windows, and then access it from the WSL, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

I don't mean to be overly negative, but at least for my purposes, the WSL just isn't quite there in terms of being a viable alternative for daily development work.

How about stuff like defragmentation, Windows registry issues, malware, adware and all the other stuff I vaguely remember? 10 years ago, I used to be a power user at Windows before that (as a gamer/kid) but really though I forgot what time I needed to put into the laptop just to keep it up to performance.

> Depending on who you ask, defragging an SSD ranges between only slightly beneficial, totally pointless, and actively harmful.

Fragmentation will slow down your SSD. For non-server workloads, the SSD is very likely still plenty fast. Running a hard drive defragging program on your SSD will only address one of the two forms of fragmentation that SSDs are subject to, and thus will not help performance much. It will also unnecessarily burn through some of the SSD's limited write endurance, but that is almost never worth worrying about.

Defragmentation is something from prehistoric ages of Windows (if I remember correctly, they made it automatic in Vista). Malware, adware etc are the same class of problems as unprotected sex: if you are careful, you are safe and will never see it. It's not a Windows "feature".

I've always felt this was just the law of large numbers: The world has more PC users running Windows, so people who are writing malware would be casting the widest net by attacking PCs running Windows and since the bad guy is also likely using/familiar with a PC running Windows.

The second the paradigm changes, the value equation changes for everyone involved.

I second the WSL recommendation. I use it every day building a large SaaS product that is Rails (backend and legacy front end), Vuejs, C# (WinForms app for deep system integration on point-of-sale computers).

That's exactly the problem: they work well enough for some limited applications. Thing is, "well enough" isn't a reason to get people moving to MS's platform - if I already have a great dev environment that runs on Mac or Linux, why would I switch? I already have perfect integration between my CLI tools and the OS, first-class support in a lot of FOSS projects, and a strong community around the platform, all of which I'd lose if I switched. In exchange I'd gain nothing but the numerous headaches (forced updates, spyware, in-OS ads, general cruft and legacy baggage, etc) of Windows.

"Good enough" might stop people switching away from the platform, but it's not enough to bring back those who've already left. If Microsoft wants to bring people back to Windows as opposed to just stopping the bleeding, they'll have to deliver an experience that's actually superior to the other platforms. Given the current state of Windows 10, I don't think they'll have an easy time pulling that off.

Windows keeps breaking with every update. My touchpad randomly stops working. Startup is excruciatingly slow even on an i7 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Starting up from sleep takes nearly as long, and for some reason, it takes at least 5 minutes for the machine to work at normal processing power again.

The search function is still as broken as ever. There is a useless "People" tab near the clock that hogs my memory. Then there is that other useless thing - Cortana. There are random noises for whatever error or notification that keeps playing in the background. Permission control is still completely broken. The Control Panel is a confused mess.

If I could go back to Windows 7, I might still be interested in keeping a Windows laptop. But 10 just keeps getting in my way. I just want to launch Chrome and use Google Docs, but Windows wants to distract me with a million little nuisances.

I had similar issues with a home-rolled desktop(nothing ridiculous! intel CPU, amd GPU, adaptec raid card, stack of ram. No old or weird hardware) and eventually just gave up and sold the entire lot. The last straw for me, after many update issues, is when it decided to update on its own in the middle of the night and then refuse to boot due to some date/time mismatch error killing the windows activation so much it wouldn't even start up beyond the error message. I googled it, and it ended up being faster to reinstall than fix since i had an install USB on hand.(it was some huge mess of "mount the boot drive on another system and then...")

I just use my(pre-current design/mk1 retina) macbook pro with the same monitor at my desk now

That’s not normal behavior (random sounds, slow startup and wake). You should check the event viewer for errors, something is wrong with your system. I’ve had problems like that in the past with bad drivers. Once the driver was upgraded the problems went away.

But software preference is a very subjective thing - it's better not to venture into analyzing it if you've mostly been working with a single OS.

As a Linux user (who also owns a Macbook), I find OSX to be a weak substitute. Many features (that we take for granted in Linux-land) require downloading binaries from unknown sources, vastly inferior package management, can use 32 gigs of RAM, relative lack of server-side packages, installs and updates take longer, poor support for NVidia etc. But this is all just my opinion - I'm quite used to running Linux.

Windows is actually a fine OS too - just different. In fact, running on an uncountable number of hardware configurations is a feat of engineering. Not to mention backward compatibility.

High Sierra has had some bad bugs, some that made my stomach churn even more than root access. One's that directly impacted my work flow make me the most angry: regular screen flickering, occasional computer falling asleep, and two times a complete logout. This is on the current model 13" Macbook Pro touchbar. I bought it in december to upgrade from my 2012 model.

I keep up to date on the software, but I sincerely hope after High Sierra Apple poured the necessary resources into making Mojave different. The thing about OS X is when it's working in my opinion it blows every other operating system out of the water. Clean. At least for my own workflow.

I don't buy a macbook for it's hardware. It could be two pounds heavier, have half the RAM for twice the price and look like a shoebox for all I care. OS X is what I'm paying thousands of dollars for.

I've had more issues with high sierra than any release since lion, but still less than i've had with windows 10(and i even own a surface pro!). I really hate having to choose between two bad options, but it's more a borderline unacceptable option with 10 and a begrudgingly workable one with HS.

I'm completely with you, and i don't understand how it seems to have peaked in reliability somewhere around 10.9-10.11 and just slid downhill since. 10.9-10 was probably the most reliable release since 10.6. I would pay significant extra money for some kind of ESR/enterprise release that was that stable just to get stuff done.

From a usability perspective peak Windows was 7. Despite years of use I still dislike Windows insistence on extreme flatness, and still find it counter-productive. Even with the huge gain from WSL and some other newer features of Windows the horrible privacy model, ads in menus, and a return to commonly occurring BSODs cancel out the improvements.

I could have failing memory, but I don't recall ever seeing a blue screen in 7 across a selection of machines.

Over on the Mac peak seems to have been around Mavericks, most of the changes since have been rearranging the furniture, and adding pointless flatness (thankfully not to the extreme variant of Windows). The number of minor annoyances and niggles has been growing steadily. Reliability has been trending down to the point that High Sierra during my 6 month ownership of a '16 MBP actually felt more flaky than Windows - a first I never thought I'd see. Back on Sierra with a '15 has fixed that.

Like you I'd vote with my wallet for an ESR or Mavericks with security and driver updates. I'll take dark mode on that though. :)

Also the focus notification when using a fullscreen app. Had to turn it off in two different places. Granted my mac gets a ton of notifications too so its not that big of a deal. Microsoft could just use with a little better notification management screen to quickly turn them off.

Everyone agree we are a small niche. So anything below will have a minimal impact in the so important shareholders pockets, and win a enough love for us, IMHO:

- Apple hate to give better, more powerfull hardware with enough flexibility (change SSD, Memory, so not more glue. End). Make a limited true mac pro, heck, make it semi-ugly, non-thin so most will not want that, and VICTORY.

- MS give the hardware but refuse to give away the spyware. Give a solid Windows 2000 Server alike thing without cruft, give it with a LTS edition and even ask money for it, dammit. VICTORY

- Google could give a combo chrome machine/linux with the hardware/LTS edition, stick to it, VICTORY.

Libreoffice has some ms office compatability, and a surprising (and rapidly increasing) amount of stuff works fine in wine. I think an old but relatively recent photoshop version (cs6?) has an almost perfect rating.

Other users can report their experiences, but I've never been prompted to try Safari in three years of using OS X daily. Default web browser is available in the first page of system preferences and all the stock applications (Mail, Notes, etc) open links in there, unlike Windows settings opening Edge if you click something like "Learn more".

I’ve had to work with, presumably, the same types of documents from layers as the GP. LibreOffice is fine if everyone is using it. It ends up being a bit of extra work to actually use in practice in a mixed environment. Some legal documents have a lot of formatting that imitates creating a layout with a typewriter and the structure is important. LibreOffice can be slightly off in meaningful ways from a WYSIWYG standpoint, but not necessarily a file format standpoint. So while you can open and edit, the output you will print may be off in subtle ways because you added some extra spacing, you have a different version of a font, etc.

While it’s possibly to make documents that work correctly in both editors with this formatting, you’re simply not going to get people out of their flow. It’s received as well as if the legal team started telling you what your Vim config should be ;).

It ends up being cheaper in terms of time saved for everyone to just buy office. I have a copy of Office just for Word based legal interactions and Excel and use LibreOffice for everything else out of preference for the “old school” UI.

Some time ago (shortly after MSO2016 for Mac release), I had to fill in a certain document, which I did and returned. Except it wasn't filled correctly, because Word 2016 for Mac didn't support the form controls, the document used them and I had no idea about that.

The other party called, we met, compared what we have both seen on the screen, corrected the document and closed that with "word acting funny for whatever reason" (the other party used 2013 for Windows). If I was using LibreOffice and something similar would happen, despite that they do a great job, the blame would be distributed in another fashion.

Fast forward several months and I see in the monthly update release notes, that the forms feature was added to the Mac release.